Artificial Intelligence is still the future

JOHN McCARTHY IS an
optimist.
Yet the field McCarthy is most commonly associated with, artificial
intelligence, has made little progress since 1956, when he convened the first
Dartmouth
conference.

"I've been working on logical AI since 1958," he says, "and I've done some I
think good work (and other people also), but still we don't have human-level
intelligence yet. I can't predict any definite date at which it will be
achieved, even though Ray Kurzweil is eager to say it will happen by 2029. If I
live to be 102 and am still capable of laughing I expect to laugh at him then."

He sees no evidence, either, for that science fiction staple the Singularity.
Even so, he remains optimistic. He points to genetics as an example. Mendel laid
the foundations in 1865, but the genetic code wasn't cracked until the 1960s,
And even now, "Still we don't know how genetics controls the shape of an animal.
So that's taken even longer than I have so far. Hard scientific problems are
hard."

McCarthy's less formal interests are wide-ranging: human expansion beyond the
earth, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and, the topic he most wants
to talk about, sustainability.

Partly, he attributes this to his background. "I was brought up as a
communist," he says. As a child, he read a translation of a Russian's children's
primer, 100,0000 Whys, which, he says, "was enormously optimistic about
technology". (McCarthy became a liberal in 1952, then, in 1972, a Republican).
Attending local colloquia on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has
sparked thoughts about what kind of intelligence would likely exist.

Take, for example, the difference between octopus eyes and vertebrate eyes,
which do the same job but are completely unrelated genetically. "It says the
world presents the same kinds of problems to animals and plants, and sometimes
they solve them, and even things with quite different backgrounds may come up
with the same solution." Applying that to SETI, he imagines that the networks of
neuron in which intelligence is implemented on earth might exist in other solar
systems where intelligence evolved differently – though that intelligence would
still be able to do arithmetic and know mathematics. Sustainability occupies
many pages of
his Web site. ("Why," he asks parenthetically, "won't Who's Who
let you list your Web address?") The gist: "Doom-saying is mistaken, and
material progress of the kind we've had in the past is sustainable for the
foreseeable future, contrary to public opinion."

McCarthy's site assembles evidence to back up his contention on a range of
topics: energy, food supply, population, water, forests, wood supply, pollution
and biodiversity. "My argument that these menaces will be overcome does not
depend on any futuristic technology. It depends on the technology we already
have." Although, he adds, "Naturally there will be futuristic technology."

This sort of optimism is at the very least unfashionable at the moment, but
McCarthy believes the evidence supports his point of view, noting that the
average time frame for disaster predictions is two years. "I would say that the
area where I'm weakest is erosion, because the estimates of the rate of loss of
topsoil by erosion that I've found differ by a factor of 100 from each other."
Overall, he says, "The key thing that gives rise to confidence is that plenty of
energy is available, most specifically nuclear energy, but solar probably will
also work."

McCarthy, who for a time early in his life read a lot of science fiction, is,
however, willing to consider solutions that environmentalists generally would
hate. For example, when William Calvin predicted in Atlantic Monthly in
1998 that the Gulf Stream would stop, he asked his students to calculate the
cost of covering Western Europe with transparent plastic, making it a giant
greenhouse.

"Calvin and the doomsters in general do not write counter-measures to the
disasters they are predicting," he says. "There is an actual prejudice against
global engineering on the grounds of interfering with nature."

Overall, he says, "I like to think in terms of opportunities rather than
inevitabilities. So technology will offer that opportunity. Who will take it is
another question." µ